There have been a lot of questions raised since Governor Schwarzenegger introduced his proposed 2007-2008 budget last week.  First and foremost, the Governor is to be firmly commended for coming out of the gate with a verbal commitment not to raise taxes to deal with the huge overspending problem facing California state government.  As most FR readers know, the Governor directed his agency and department heads to work on a state budget that cuts state spending across the board by 10% (well, actually, it was really a 10% decrease in what the anticipated budget would have been…  I know, it’s confusing.)
 
When the proposal was unveiled, it contained in it some very "high profile" cuts that would be very impactful on Californians — two that immediately come to mind are the closing of a great number of state parks, and everyone has heard about the Governor’s proposal to grant an early releases to tens of thousands of "non-violent" felons.  It was all very dramatic when announced, and definitely drove home the message that Californians all around the state were going to be negatively impacted by the "austerity plan" of the Governor.
 
As soon as the budget was released, I started to receive emails and calls from folks on the GOP side of things, complaining about the across-the-board style of cuts.  "Things that should be cut more are not, and things that shouldn’t be cut, are being cut," said one Assemblymember to whom I spoke.  To all of those people, I pushed back, saying that if the Governor was proposing a 10% across-the-board cut, Republicans need to be there.  I said that I understood the politics and using the KISS technique ("keep it simple, stupid") to market the cuts. 
 
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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.